Sandbags have a wide variety of uses which include providing reinforcement in flood situations, and protection or fortification in various military applications. In flooding situations, emphasis is often placed upon filling sandbags rapidly and deploying them where needed. Typically, in the past, the filling of sandbags has been accomplished by one individual holding a sandbag open, while another individual shovels amounts of sand into the sandbag. Anyone who has undertaken to fill sandbags in this manner will appreciate that a number of problems exist with this method. First, the person doing the shoveling must be very careful to ensure that all or most of the sand in each shovelful makes it into the sandbag. This normally requires the shoveler to slow down briefly, immediately prior to providing the sand into the sandbag. Oftentimes, the shoveler will place the tip of the shovel blade into the sandbag to ensure that all or most of the sand makes it into the bag. This too slows down the sandbag filling process. A second problem which can occur is that an individual holding the sandbag can have their fingers hit or nicked with the blade of the shovel, if the shoveler is not careful. Needless to say, this can give rise to serious injury.
In other situations, such as military applications, the rapidity with which sandbags are filled may not be as critical as the volume of sandbags which are ultimately needed. Manually filling sandbags as described above is a slow and cumbersome process and falls short of enabling a large volume of sandbags to be filled in an efficient manner.
This invention arose out of concerns associated with providing sandbag filling apparatuses and methods of forming sandbag filling apparatuses which enable sandbags to be filled quickly, safely and efficiently.